There are many spinal stenosis treatment options you should consider before resorting to surgery. Most patients with spinal stenosis respond well to non-surgical treatments such as medication, physical therapy, and gentle chiropractic care. Spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the spinal canal, typically caused by age, injury, or congenital disorder. The condition can cause difficulty […]
You Should Know
After a Car Accident
After a car accident, it’s natural to focus on your physical injuries. After all, even in a minor fender bender, your body is exposed to powerful and violent forces. Even if you were lucky enough to escape the accident without serious or life threatening physical injuries, you might be surprised by the flood of emotions that can come after a Florida car accident.
Accepting new patients. Call 855-509-5400 to schedule your appointment.
We Accept All Major Medical Health Insurance and Medicare.
Emotional Turmoil After a Car Accident
It’s natural to experience strong emotions such as shock, guilt, grief, helplessness, confusion, and fear after a car accident.
Some patients report continuing to feel afraid even though they know the danger has passed. Others report experiencing mood swings or having periods of crying uncontrollably. The feelings of sadness or depression after a car accident are very common, and can be intense. Be sure to tell your chiropractor if these feelings are stopping you from doing your normal daily activities.
Increased anxiety is another natural and common reaction to your car accident. You may also feel anger, irritability, and agitation. These feelings may be directed at the other driver (even if you were at fault) or you may take your anger out on your loved ones, friends and co-workers.
On the other end of the spectrum are feelings of guilt, shame, and self-blame (even if you weren’t at fault). You may find yourself ruminating on what you could have done or not done to prevent the accident.
Immediately after your car accident, it is normal to feel a flood of emotions, like those listed above. However, if you are still battling these post-accident emotional symptoms more than 3 months after your accident, you may be suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). This is a condition that can develop after any type of traumatizing event.
Car accidents can trigger PTSD symptoms including experiencing flashbacks of the accident. In fact, research 1 has shown that an estimated 39.2% of motor vehicle accident survivors develop PTSD as a result.
Many suffering with PTSD also simultaneously have an intense fear of driving and/or a related anxiety disorder.
Returning to driving after a car accident
If your injuries won’t prevent you from driving for the rest of your life, at some point you’ll have to get back behind the wheel of a car. You’ll probably feel some anxiety the first time behind the wheel. You may even feel anxiety riding as a passenger in the car. Rest assured that this is natural.
Once back behind the wheel, you’ll probably find that you drive more cautiously than before. If your accident was at night, you may experience extra high anxiety around night driving.
If you’ve been in a car accident, you probably have questions. Fortunately, Dr. Danielle Hurd, DC of Advanced Wellness Solutions has many of the answers you need including:
- Is what I’m experiencing normal?
- How long will it be until I feel better?
The Chiropractor You Choose Makes a Difference
Dr. Danielle Hurd, DC knows first hand the emotional aftermath of surviving a car crash. While attending USF to obtain her BS in biomedical science, she was injured in a car accident– a near head on collision on part of SR 60 that is only 2 lanes. The other driver had tried to pass a semi-truck on his way to work. It was early morning, so when she saw the other driver’s headlights emerge from behind the semi-truck, she veered off the road quickly. Had she not reacted as quickly as she did, the other driver would have hit her head on. Instead, his pick-up truck struck her just behind the driver’s door, tearing a hole in the rear door of the mini-van she was driving.
She didn’t realize she was seriously injured until the next day when the adrenaline rush wore off.
Dr. Danielle’s car accident caused serious injuries and headaches. The pain forced her to leave school for a semester. The silver lining is that it helped her to choose her career. Thanks to the care she received from her chiropractor (who encouraged her to attend Palmer College of Chiropractic), she was able to return to USF the next semester and complete her bachelor’s degree. She went on to graduate in 2014 from Palmer College of Chiropractic in Port Orange Florida.
The chiropractor you choose makes a difference!
Dr. Danielle makes it a point to create a soothing, nurturing office environment at Advanced Wellness Solutions. She survived a serious car accident and has experienced the intense feelings that follow. It’s why her office has an “office dog.” William seems to know when patients need emotional support, even though he stays behind the glass door in the front desk area.
The doctor you choose makes a difference. If you or someone you know has been in a car accident, call 855-509-5400 to make an appointment with Advanced Wellness Solutions.
Working with Dr. Google
It’s only natural. You’ve been feeling pain in your upper back and neck for a while. You’ve also noticed your arm hurts and you’re starting to feel a tingly “pins and needles” sensation. So you do what EVERYONE with a smart phone or computer does these days – you ask Dr. Google. Just remember that online sources vary widely in credibility. Without medical education, it’s easy to jump to conclusions and worst-case scenarios.
When you’re searching for the cause of your symptoms on the internet, you might find that the online diagnoses tend to escalate quickly… alarmingly quickly. These sites may include a list of scary complications or symptoms that are red flags for which you should seek immediate medical attention. Many times, those symptoms are super vague and could apply to anything. Feeling lightheaded? Seek immediate medical attention! Feeling fatigued? Call 911!
While it’s frustrating, there’s a good reason why many REPUTABLE online medical information websites tend to catastrophize even the most benign symptoms and ailments. Their goal is to get you to contact your primary care physician to follow up.
Let’s take a look at our hypothetical symptom search. You’ve been feeling pain in your upper back and neck for a while. You’ve also noticed your arm hurts and you’re starting to feel a tingly “pins and needles” sensation. When you typed in your symptoms, you may have seen “T4 syndrome” offered as a possible diagnosis. As you read the symptoms, you realize that if you look at your hands for long enough, you could swear they’re turning blue.
What you may not know is T4 syndrome is a rare yet deceptive issue that can present in many different ways. In other words, you may or may not have T4 syndrome or T4 damage. To find out if you do, you’ll need to see your physician or chiropractor. T4 syndrome can be confused with carpal tunnel syndrome, myofascial pain syndromes, cervical spine degenerative conditions, thoracic outlet syndrome, cardiac pain or pain originating from the viscera.
The professionals at Advanced Wellness Solutions are primary care physicians and have the training and skills that allows them to make a medical diagnosis.
Dr. Google isn’t a licensed practicing physician – it’s a search engine that indexes and catalogs the trillions of web pages published to the internet. So while Google does its best to provide you with the most accurate information, how you word that search will greatly determine the quality of the results you see.
For example, when a member of the general public searches for symptom information online, they will see different information displayed than when Dr. Danielle Hurd, DC types those same symptoms into the very same search engine.
There are two reasons for this.
First, Dr. Danielle will use medical terminology when composing her search query. This effectively weeds out the unreliable results that might appear in a “general” search done by someone without medical training.
Second, Google know you and your typical search patterns. For example, let’s say your typical search pattern takes you to “hysterical cat videos” on the reg. When you suddenly start searching for the cause of your wrist pain, Google knows you’re not a primary care physician. That’s why it’s not going to show you peer reviewed research publications in your search. While Google may know your search patterns, but it doesn’t know your individual health history.
For example, an Advanced Wellness Solutions patient received a copy of an imaging report after a knee injury ater a weekend visit to the ER. Concerned, she began searching the internet to help her interpret the results. Just a few days before, she had been searching to investigate a relative’s heart condition. Unfortunately, she made a typographical error in her search of the imaging report findings. Instead of seeing information about her knee injury, she instead was seeing articles about a deadly heart condition. Fortunately, she contacted Advanced Wellness Solutions. We helped her to correctly interpret her imaging and get her scheduled for much needed surgery.
There’s nothing wrong with searching for your symptoms online. You should educate yourself . You should ask questions. You should consider yourself a partner with your physician or chiropractor in your own medical care.
Dr. Danielle Hurd, DC encourages her patients to be active participants in their own care. When you come into her office with information you’ve found online, it provides a great starting point for the conversation. Just remember, it’s the internet’s job to get you to call a trusted medical professional. You should never attempt to treat yourself without first consulting a health care professional.
Sleep is Important for Health
Sleep is important for health and wellbeing. It’s far from uneventful, According to the NIH, sleep is essential for vital bodily functions such as growth and development, energy conservation, brain waste clearance, modulation of immune responses, cognition, performance, vigilance, disease, and psychological state. Sleep is also critically important to healing from injuries. Chronic pain is just one of many conditions that can keep you from getting the healthy sleep you need..
If you’re not getting a good night’s sleep, you’re not alone. The American Sleep Association estimates that 50-70 million adults in the US have a sleep disorder.
Though the exact mechanisms are not fully understood, the current research suggests that individuals with a sleep disorder may be more likely to develop chronic pain and people with chronic pain are more likely to have trouble sleeping.1
A growing body of evidence suggests that sleep problems pose an important risk for the development of musculoskeletal pain in adolescents. A large cross-sectional study involving 6986 adolescents found short sleep time to be a risk factor associated with regional musculoskeletal pain, particularly chronic regional pain and chronic widespread pain.2
Why Sleep is Important for Health
When you crawl into bed to go to sleep, you might think your body is shutting down and resting. We now know nothing could be further from the truth. Sleepy time is when your body performs many “heavy lifting” tasks that repair, restore and maintain your mind, body and health. These processes are so intensive that the body waits until you’re asleep to perform them. This is why getting proper sleep following surgery or an injury is an important part of the healing process.
If you been injured in a car wreck or suffer from chronic pain, getting that healthy sleep is easier said than done.
Sleep is Important for Health & Injury Recovery
While sleep is important for health, it plays a surprisingly important role in injury recovery . Whether you’ve been in a car accident or you’ve hurt yourself at work or play, you need to get healthy sleep so you body can repair damage to muscles, ligaments and tendon, and even bones.3
According to John DeLucchi, Physical Therapy Manager for OrthoCarolina, “If you want to upgrade your athleticism, decrease your risk of injury, decrease persistent pain, recover faster, boost your immune system, have more energy and perform better, sleep is critical.” 4
Your immune system relies on sleep to be able to fight harmful substances. When you don’t get enough sleep, your immune system can’t properly protect your body from infection. Your body makes white blood cells while you sleep. These white blood cells attack viruses and bacteria that can slow the healing process as well as make you sick.
Sleep is when the body manufactures hormones. During healthy sleep cycles, the brain triggers the release of hormones that encourage tissue growth to repair blood vessels. This helps wounds to heal faster and restores sore or damaged muscles. Some of the hormones your body makes and releases during sleep slow breathing and relax muscles. This process can reduce inflammation and assist with healing. Other hormones your body releases are the ones that make you feel hungry or full. When you don’t get enough sleep, the hormone levels of ghrelin go up. Ghrelin is called the ‘hunger hormone’ because it stimulates appetite, increases food intake and promotes fat storage. 5 At the same time the hormones that tell your body that you’re full (leptin) go down. 4 This is why poor sleep patterns often lead to overeating and obesity.
So – to recap – healthy sleep helps you
- heal and recover after surgery or injury
- relax muscles
- repair blood vessels
- fight infection
- restore sore and damaged muscles
- maintain a healthy weight
In a cruel catch-22, chronic pain sufferers find it difficult to get healthy sleep. Chronic pain can lead to sleep disturbances, depression and a heightened risk of suicide.5 Healthy sleep plays a vital role in battling chronic pain, but chronic pain often prevents healthy sleep patterns.
Good Sleep Hygiene
Here are some things to try to help you get a healthy night’s sleep.
-
- Make your bedroom a sleep sanctuary. Reserve the bedroom for sleep, intimacy, and other restful activities.
- Keep your bedroom cool. Between 60 and 67 degrees Fahrenheit for optimal sleep.6
- Banish electronics from your bedroom.
- Be careful about napping. Taking a nap at the peak of sleepiness in the afternoon can help to supplement hours missed at night. However, daytime naps can also interfere with your ability to sleep at night.
- Instead of napping, try taking a brisk walk. Exercising – especially when you’re having trouble sleeping – is tough but worth the efforts. Make sure to avoid exercising within three hours of bedtime.
- Avoid caffeine after noon.
- Alcohol is not a sleep aid. While many people think drinking alcohol helps you sleep, studies show the opposite is true. 7 While alcohol will make you fall asleep faster, the quality of sleep you get is greatly diminished. The more you drink, and the closer your drinking is to bedtime, the more it will negatively impact the quality of your sleep.
If you’re having trouble sleeping, it’s time to schedule an appointment with Advanced Wellness Solutions. Acupuncture has been used for thousands of years to:
- Reduce depression and anxiety 7
- Improved sleep quality, sleep efficiency and total sleep time8
- Increase energy and improve fatigue9
Call (772) 403-7640 to schedule your appointment.
Pain Medications for Pain Management
Pain medications often play a prominent role in pain management. Unfortunately, long-term painkiller abuse can lead to serious cardiovascular issues, liver and/or kidney disease or failure, decrease in immunity, gastrointestinal problems and even death resulting from toxicity or overdose.
Gentle chiropractic care can be a powerful tool in providing drug free pain relief.
Advanced Wellness Solutions is accepting new patients.
We Accept All Major Medical Health Insurance and Medicare.
Call 855-509-5400 to schedule your appointment.
In pain? Inflammation is to blame.
Pain is one of the body’s vital defense mechanisms. Injuries often cause micro-tears and micro lesions. These cause inflammation which in turn causes pain.
Pain lets the brain know that damage or death has occurred to the cells in the affected area. It’s also the way our body tells us not to use the affected area. Pain can also guide us in what to do and not do after an injury. Persisting in activities that cause sharp pain can cause even more damage and slow healing.
If you’ve ever been in a car accident, you may have refused treatment at the scene only to wake up the next morning feeling intense pain. The reason behind this cue to your body’s incredible ability to keep you alive. During your Florida car accident, your body released an adrenaline rush. An adrenaline rush, like pain, is another of the body’s vital defense mechanisms. This hormonal rush triggers specific processes in the body to help you survive. It decreases your ability to feel pain, increases your strength temporarily and sharpens your mental focus.
If you were being mauled by a tiger, an adrenaline rush is a good thing. It allows you to ignore your injuries and escape becoming a meal for a hungry tiger. However, the rush of adrenaline only decreases pain temporarily. After the effects wear off, you may be desperate to get your hands on immediate pain relief.
When you’re in pain, you want fast effective pain relief. You want to get back to doing everything you were doing before your injury. The fastest easiest way to treat pain is by using pain medications for pain management. Unfortunately, we’re learning that pain relief medications – both prescription and OTC – have an unexpected dark side.
Painful Truth: Pain medications do not speed up the healing process.
Pain medications for pain management – used in the short term – can provide symptomatic relief. OTC and prescription pain relief medications can be very beneficial for the first 7 – 10 days after a traumatic injury. They are especially beneficial to use while gentle chiropractic care breaks up scar tissue and adhesions, providing long term relief from stiffness and pain.
Unfortunately, we’re learning that you can’t find chronic pain relief in a pill. Opioid analgesics also known as narcotic analgesics, modify pain messages in the brain. Often prescribed for chronic pain, these drugs can be dangerous and addictive. In a horrific catch-22, they can actually cause your pain to get worse,
Prescription painkillers cause the pain you feel to increase over time.
New studies on pain medications for pain management are painting an especially grim picture pointing to the long term effects of using opioids for chronic pain. It’s call Opioid-Induced Hyperalgesia or OIH. OIH is the increased perception of pain leads to needing higher doses to achieve the desired effect.
Studies show that when you use an opioid, it sets off a chain of immune signals in the spinal cord that amplify pain rather than dulling it, even after the drug leaves the body.1
Peter Grace, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado Boulder is trying to trace hyperalgesia to the way opioids affect the immune system. His team injured rats to mimic the nerve pain humans feel. Ten days after the injury, half the rats received a 5-day treatment of morphine. Over the next 12 weeks, the researchers periodically measured the rodents’ threshold of pain. After 6 weeks, the injured rats that had received no morphine returned to the same sensitivity as uninjured control rats. Meanwhile, it took morphine-treated rats 12 weeks – twice as long – to return to the same pain sensitivity as the control rats. 2, 3
Using prescription painkillers to manage pain is a lot like blowing your nose with a tissue filled with sneezing powder!
The higher the dose, more risk of overdose all the while with the patient experiencing increasing pain levels. Some studies suggest that it makes the pain even worse than when the patient began treatment.
Based on what has been learned from animal and human studies, the following may be true:4,5
- The treatment of pain with high doses of opiates may increase the chance of greater levels of pain at later times.
- Taking high doses of opiates for chronic pain may increase levels of postoperative pain, even when their opiate doses are increased.
- People who use or who have used opiates in the past, may have increased pain responses to such procedures as having their blood drawn.
The key takeaway here is that your pain can keep increasing not because of an injury, but due to the action of the opioids themselves.
According to Dr. Al Clavel who specializes in pain medicine, there’s another reason opioids can make pain worse. He writes:
Our bodies have natural opioids called endorphins. If your body becomes used to opioid pain medication, its ability to create and use natural endorphins will decrease. This makes you lose the ability to reduce pain on your own.
Over the Counter Pain Relief
There are many safer, proven ways to help relieve chronic pain. One is by using over the counter (OTC) painkillers. OTC painkillers include NSAIDs (non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs) and acetaminophen relieve (brand name Tylenol). NSAIDS relieve pain by reducing the production of prostaglandins, which are hormone-like substances that cause pain. Acetaminophen works on the parts of the brain that receive the pain messages.
OTC painkillers are easily available, aren’t habit-forming, and won’t leave you constipated. However, even OTC painkillers can increase the risk of heart attack or stroke. OTC painkillers have also been known to cause stomach ulcers and bleeding as well as liver and kidney problems. These risks increase with sustained use.
If you’ve been using OTC pain relievers for more than 14 days straight, you should probably talk to your health care provider about the risks. Just because its sold without a prescription doesn’t mean that OTC pain relievers are “safe” for long term use.
Topical Pain Relief
Topical pain relievers or liniments are also available without a doctor’s prescription. These products include creams, lotions, or sprays that are applied to the skin in order to relieve pain from sore muscles and arthritis.
Chiropractic Care for Pain Relief
Chiropractors specialize in treating the musculoskeletal injuries that cause acute and chronic pain. Chiropractic care includes a variety of pill free/drug free treatment modalities that allow your body to heal naturally.
Chiropractic care is proven effective. A study that compared the effectiveness of prescribed medications to spinal manipulation found that 94% of patients who underwent chiropractic treatment saw a 30% reduction in low back pain after 4 weeks. In comparison only 56% of patients who used regular medical care saw a 30% reduction in low back pain after 4 weeks.6
Acupuncture for Pain Relief
Acupuncture has been providing effective drug free pain relief for thousands of years.
Many studies have been performed to measure the effectiveness of acupuncture. Researchers with the Acupuncture Trialists’ Collaboration compiled the raw data from trials where the main outcome measures were pain and function. The results from these studies concluded that acupuncture is an effective method of treating chronic pain. They concluded that 7
- acupuncture is effective for the treatment of chronic pain
- that the effects of acupuncture persist for up to 12 months,
- and that the benefits of acupuncture cannot be explained away solely by the placebo effect.
The report itself 8 states:
Acupuncture is effective for the treatment of chronic musculoskeletal, headache, and osteoarthritis pain.
At Advanced Wellness Solutions, we would love to help you get back to living the life you love pain free! Call us at 855-509-5400 to schedule an appointment today.
You Should Know: Muscle Relaxing Drugs
If you’ve ever had a muscle spasm, you know how painful it can be. Muscle spasms can cause severe neck and back pain. They can make your life miserable.
Modern chiropractic care provides many treatment modalities that provide drug free pain relief. Before you turn to muscle relaxers for back or neck pain, here’s some things you should know.
If you seek usual medical care (UMC) for back pain, the doctor may prescribe muscle relaxants.1
New treatment guidelines from the ACP strongly recommend that people with back pain first try non-drug measures such as yoga, physical therapy, chiropractic and massage before resorting to over-the-counter or prescription pain relievers and muscle relaxants.2
What are muscle relaxers
The term “muscle relaxers” is definitely deceiving because this classification includes a wide range of drugs with different indications and mechanisms of action.3
Many muscle relaxers cause sedation throughout the central nervous system. In other words, they make all of your muscles relax, not just the tight ones. They also make you feel sleepy. If acute pain from an injury is making it difficult to sleep, this can be a good thing. Sleep helps you heal. However, this can make living your life during your waking hours difficult.
There is growing concern surrounding these drugs because it is not clear how effective muscle relaxers are when it comes to relieving pain. Concerns have been also raised about the adverse side effects involved with many of these drugs. In addition to sedation, potential adverse effects include drowsiness, headache, blurred vision, nausea, vomiting and the potential for addiction.3
Acute Pain vs Chronic Pain
Acute pain is immediate pain. You can often identify what you were doing to cause the pain. Sometimes the cause of acute pain can be a seemingly harmless movement, like lifting something heavy. On the other hand, chronic pain is pain that lasts beyond the typical expected healing period.
Jeffrey E. Keller is a Board Certified Emergency Physician with 25 years of emergency medicine practice experience before moving full time into his “true calling” of Correctional Medicine. His recommendations to physicians regarding prescribing muscle relaxers in his post Skeletal Muscle Relaxers Do Not Relax Skeletal Muscles.
1. Never prescribe muscle relaxers long term for chronic conditions.
2. If you prescribe a “muscle relaxer” for acute low back pain, use them only for a short time. The number usually bandied about is no more than 7 days.
Ignore Pain at Your Peril
Pain is simply one way your body communicates with you. It’s your brain’s way of saying, “STOP! BE CAREFUL! This part of your body needs your attention!”
Muscle relaxers mask the symptom of muscle spasm pain. A muscle spasm is not only a reaction to an injury, it’s also your body’s way of trying to protect itself from further injury.
Chiropractic is a health care profession dedicated to providing non-surgical treatment of disorders of the nervous system and musculoskeletal system. Chiropractors have a wide assortment of proven treatments and modalities that can provide drug free pain relief for muscle spasms.4
Advanced Wellness Solutions focuses on creating individualized treatment plans incorporating treatment modalities combined with the use of patient-driven care such as exercise, activity modification, and ergonomic modifications. In other words, Dr. Danielle has a lot of tricks up her sleeve to help you get drug free relief from muscle spasm pain.
Contact Advanced Wellness Solutions at 855-509-5400 to schedule your appointment today.
Get Relief from Chronic Pain
No one likes living with chronic pain, but many of us push through rather than address the underlying issue(s). Did you know that chronic pain can harm your health even if it’s not limiting your activities? Fortunately, effective gentle chiropractic care can provide drug free relief from chronic pain.
Chronic Pain Significantly Impacts Your Overall Health
If you’re living with (and ignoring) chronic pain, university medical school studies reveal that you may be doing long term damage to your overall health.
According to a University of Utah School of Medicine report published at NCBI, chronic pain significantly impacts your overall health. One of the ways chronic pain can affect your health is by disrupting your sleep. According to a study released by the American Psychological Association, healthy sleep has been proven to be the single most important factor in predicting longevity. Healthy sleep is more influential than diet, exercise, or heredity for predicting longevity!
Another negative health effect of chronic pain is it impairs your cognitive processes, brain function – even your your mood and your mental health. 1 2 3
As if that laundry list weren’t enough, the University of Utah study shows that chronic pain can even impact your cardiovascular health, not to mention your sexual function.
Gentle Chiropractic Care Provides Drug Free Relief from Chronic Pain.
The good news is that chronic pain can often be successfully managed without drugs, injections or surgery.
Modern chiropractic care addresses so much more than just neck and back pain. Modern chiropractors treat the whole person – not just a specific body part.
Dr. Danielle has helped hundreds of patients find drug free relief from chronic pain.
If you’re dealing with chronic pain – don’t delay! Chronic pain can have a domino effect on your overall health!
Don’t suffer another day with chronic pain!, You owe it to yourself to schedule an appointment with Advanced Wellness Solutions. Call 855-509-5400 to schedule your appointment today.